corollary: Music

Friday, 13 October 2006

Avoiding copyright violations

Listening to:

Handel, Saul.

Oh Fatal Consequence of Rage

I just used Google to look up the phrase “Fatal consequence of rage”, which is one of the numbers in Saul. I quickly appreciated that Handel’s appears to be the only use of the words. Lots of the hits returned by Google were to sites selling recordings or sheet music, but this one looked a little bit different (i.e., it was a link to prose rather than a catalogue).

I followed the link and read an interesting essay, but one that I decided was slightly odd in tone. The essay is not signed, but is part of a Music Encyclopaedia. After a little digging, I decided that the entire site is a scan of something written in the very early 20th century. The entry for Mahler is the best give-away. There he is still alive, and he has only written 6 of his “thoroughly German” symphonies.

It looks as if the site is trying to make money through Google advertisements. More power to ’em, and if the site survives, we should thank online advertising for the digitisation of public domain texts. (Or maybe they took someone else’s work, and are just paying the hosting costs. But either way, there-in lies the beauty of copyright expiry.) And while it seems slightly sharp practice not to own up to the age of the material, they did give me a cute little puzzle to muse over.

Monday, 3 April 2006

A web-searching challenge

Listening to:

Shostakovich, Cheryomushki, in the reduced orchestration, English-language version performed by the Pimlico Opera.

And your challenge is

According to this page, I went to a Proms concert on 4 August 1995, and saw Simon Rattle conduct Beethoven’s Eroica symphony. The challenge is to find out what other pieces were part of the programme that evening.

As I write, I have no idea what the answer is. My diary might tell me, and I will consult it later today, but the web seems to be of no help whatsoever. Kudos to the first link to a web-page with the relevant information.

Sunday, 29 May 2005

A fine balance

Listening to:

Summertime, performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Definitely one of the best performances of this standard I’ve ever heard. Fitzgerald and Armstrong bring out a beautiful melancholy in the song.

Just read:

Rohinton Mistry, A fine balance.

This is a finely written, compelling novel about four disparate characters in 1970s Bombay. Mistry unfolds quite a saga, drawing the characters together, and gradually making friends of them. This makes for a satisfying read, and there are plenty of obstacles to be overcome as they get there.

Some of the obstacles are within the characters, but a significant number are caused by the deprivation, poverty and exploitation that are unavoidable parts of life in ’70s Bombay. Not having any experience of the time or place, I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but the depiction in this novel makes it seem very real, and quite fascinating. (Yes, a horrid fascination in some ways, but a fascination nonetheless.)

I read this novel with my heart often in my mouth, worried that the author was not going to let his characters have a happy ending. This is a sign of good writing, and it is a good novel. However, I finished it feeling annoyed that Mistry did eventually dispose of his characters in what seemed a rather callous and capricious manner.

Monday, 28 June 2004

Love for sale; links

Listening to:

Appetising young love for sale.
Love that’s fresh and still unspoiled,
Love that’s only slightly soiled...

I have another version of this song, sung by Ella Fitzgerald.
Though she sings more verses than Washington, and is as musical as
ever, Fitzgerald really doesn’t compare, in this instance at least.
Washington’s distinctive, almost raspy, voice is perfect for this
lyric and she nails it with a slightly derisive, cynical tone.
Fitzgerald sings the same words in a smooth and melancholy tone,
making the song rather disturbingly creepy. Creepiness is a perfectly
reasonable feeling to convey when singing a tale of sleazy
prostitution, but that doesn’t make the song as enjoyable to listen
to.

Thursday, 24 June 2004

Europe in the High Middle Ages

Listening to:

Bach, The well-tempered clavier, Book 1. This
recording is played by Angela Hewitt on the piano, and is published by
Hyperion (serial number CDA67301/2). I bought this
recording just a fortnight ago, and I definitely like it. My other
recording has Bob van Asperen on the harpsichord. What with the
Naxos recordings of Scarlatti’s sonatas, which are all on the piano
too, and a version of the Goldberg variations on piano, my music
collection is losing its ideologically pure cast.

Particularly with Bach, one can’t afford to be too precious about
this: Bach clearly intended lots of his keyboard music to be played on
whatever instrument was available, and towards the end of his life,
was even approached to try out new-fangled forte-piano instruments that were being
developed at the time. In any case, the criterion for judgement has
to be whether or not one finds the music beautiful. With Hewitt
there’s no doubt: I’ve had the CDs on many times in the past two
weeks.

Just read:

John H. Mundy, Europe in
the High Middle Ages, 1150–1309.

This big fat book covers the given period in detail, but without
often managing to convey much of a unifying theme. If there’s a big,
simple story to tell to summarise this period, Mundy doesn’t come out
and give it to the reader explicitly. Instead, the reader has to
construct it themselves. Given that I read the book over too long a
period, I didn’t often feel that I had enough detail in my head to
allow such a synthesis.

Here’s my best attempt: this period is characterised by the
growth in power of the states, particularly France, the
miniature states of northern Italy, and also England.
Simultaneously, the German empire is collapsing. In the
religious sphere, the papacy asserts its dominance over local
ecclesiastical hierarchies, but otherwise loses influence over
the states.

This story is very much behind the scenes in Mundy’s book.
Instead, his pages are dominated by descriptions of various
aspects of medieval life in this period. For example, he talks
about various social classes, many aspects of the Church
(monasteries, itinerant orders, cathedrals), and the economy. I
was particularly fascinated to hear that in this period, various
states started issuing tradable debt. In other words, you could
buy (and trade in) the equivalent of national bonds. Mundy is very good on how
this activity interacted with the Church’s prohibition of
usury. In an earlier section, he also discusses how Jews fared
in performing this activity themselves.

Hinted at, but never explicitly dealt with because they come
after his time period, are the Black Death and the Hundred Years
War. Mundy gives the impression that these are going to
completely devastate a continent that is otherwise developing in
a variety of fascinating ways. Sometimes it seems the best
efforts of humanity count as naught in the face of random
environmental hostility. (No doubt they brought the war on
themselves, but the Black Death doesn't seem fair to inflict on
anyone.)

All this good stuff is tied together in a way that is rather
bitty (again, not helped by my reading it over such a long
stretch of time). Mundy also has a writing style that is quite
dry, and that occasionally results in sentences that have to be
read twice in order to figure out what they mean.

Now reading:

Saturday, 3 January 2004

Patrick O’Brian on page and screen

Listening to:

Sidney Bechet, Runnin’ wild. New Orleans,
“Dixieland”-style jazz from 1949 and 1950. The true
connoisseurs of the day apparently deprecated it as retro and archaic.
Yes, this style of jazz had its heyday in the 1920s, but people less hung
up on how things should be, simply appreciate it as stylish, exciting
music-making. From the 21st century, it’s all equally old, and all the stars
are equally dead.

Just read:

Patrick O’Brian, The thirteen-gun
salute.

This is an enjoyable addition to O’Brian’s series of novels. There’s
not a lot of naval combat, but there’s lot of naval life, and drama. Some of the
drama is life-threatening, but more is concerned with personal relationships and how
these can play out when people are crammed together on a confined man-of-war. Stephen Maturin
gets to play a useful rôle in diplomatic negotiations, but is also allowed a
naturalist’s holiday, and enjoys the company of orangutans in and around a
Buddhist temple. The perfidious French and their agents come to a sticky end, but our
heroes also end the novel as ship-wrecked sailors on a remote island. Roll on the next book
(The nutmeg of consolation).

A recent movie:

Master and commander: the far side of the world. Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey is
actually pretty good. Occasionally, I felt he was starting to sound a bit too much
like James T. Kirk, but then, Kirk was modelled on James Cook, so what better
model could Crowe have?
I was less happy with Maturin. The actor was fine, but the adaptation to film completely ignored
the diplomatic and espionage facets of his activities and character. In the film, he is a surgeon
and a naturalist only. I felt this as a loss, though I can well believe that the film-makers felt
that trying to fit it all into the one film would be too difficult.

The naval battles were very impressive. The explosive crash and terror of cannons was very well
conveyed, and I got a strong impression of the way in which a whole crew had to work together to
pursue its goals. There were also a number of vivid images of the ship at rest (or at least, not
at battle) that conveyed the nature of ship-board life. For example, the film opens with a
shot of many hammocks
strung up below decks, with sleeping sailors crammed together. Later, there is also an impressive
aerial shot of the crew assembling on deck, emerging like a host of ants from below, and rapidly
forming into an ordered mass. Ship-life is also well-conveyed by sub-plots involving various
minor characters.

Plot-wise, the film has only a superficial resemblance to the novel The far side
of the world. In both film and book, Aubrey pursues an enemy ship around Cape Horn and
into the Pacific, and
stops off at the Galapagos islands. In the book, it’s 1812, and the enemy ship is American.
In the film, it’s 1805 and the ship is French. In the book, the enemy ship is destroyed
by nature, and the climax takes place on a deserted island where the two enemy crews have had to
take refuge. In the film, there is a big naval battle to finish things off. I wasn’t too bothered by any of this,
though it’s very easy to be cynical about the motives for the change in nationality of the
bad guys.

More significant to my mind was the admission that Aubrey is exceeding his orders in pursuing the
ship ’round Cape Horn. This doesn’t ring true to Aubrey’s character in the books.
There he’s adventurous, but he is also very concerned about his status in the naval list, and
keen to make sure that his career progresses well. In awarding marks for fidelity to source
material, I will happily let plot go by the board (particularly if, as with O’Brian, plot
isn’t hugely important in the feel of the books), but I do want to see tone and character
retained. In this way, M&C: tFSotW seemed not quite right, though close.

The films of The Lord of the Rings make an interesting contrast. They include
some glaring “tonal
errors”, but they have at least succeeded with Frodo, Sam and Gollum. Their characters are not
necessarily perfectly realised, but the dynamic between them, and
its development is definitely well done. The Aubrey-Maturin relationship is much more static through
the O’Brian novels. There’s very little development to portray, which means that I want
the relationship from the books done as well
as possible in the film. In terms of plot, the LotR is different again: getting the
plot right is important there because the story is an epic, and the plot dominates.

But I’ll give you the low-down on the LotR films when I’ve
seen The Return of the King.

Thursday, 3 October 2002

Classical music and its future

Listening to:

Mahler, symphony no. 3.

Here's
an interesting article from Salon about classical music
and its future in the modern world. There's also a link at the bottom
of the article to a much older article (in the form of a dialogue) on
much the same topic. One point that neither article makes is that
classical music probably will survive as long as people continue to
want to play and listen to it. It's not a perfect analogy, but people
still read and enjoy Shakespeare despite the fact that no-one is
writing drama in that style anymore.

Rather, commentators seem to be upset because there is this
notorious lack of connection between modern composers and audiences.
This situation is blamed on different people depending on who is
doing the blaming. Either the masses have turned into Philistines,
or the composers are arrogant, and unconcerned with popular appeal
in the belief that they are composing for posterity. I don't care
which is true. The real question is: are there great works of
musical art being created today? If the answer is no, well
that's a shame, but there is still lots of classical music out there
which I've never heard, and that stuff would be new to me. So, my
yen for novel musical sensation should be satisfied, and classical
music isn't really dead. Not only would my listening to
performances of known works keep the music alive, but so too would
the enjoyment that others take in performing these works.

If the answer to the question is yes, then I get all the advantages
of the situation where the answer was no, along with the slightly
niggling worry about how I'm expected to find the good new stuff
without having to listen to too much dross. The population of the
world is bigger now, so there's more music in absolute terms, but
I'm an optimist so I believe the proportion of good stuff is
probably roughly the same as ever it was. The only important
principle is that the good new stuff is not going to necessarily
come in classical forms. Given a changed society, there is no
guarantee that the real artists will be well-represented in the
classical arena.

Friday, 30 August 2002

DSCH 4 @ The Proms

Listening to:

Dvorak, string quartet in E flat major, op. 51.

My phone is ringing at regular intervals this morning, but all I get
when I pick it up is a beeping noise. Some misguided
machine out there is trying to communicate with me and doing a very
bad job of it.

We went to a Prom concert on Sunday night to hear Valery Gergiev
conduct Prokofiev's 3rd piano concerto and
Shostakovich's 4th symphony. The latter was really
quite amazing. It requires a huge orchestra (four clarinets, four
oboes, four flutes, bass clarinet, treble clarinet and bassoons in
the woodwind, two harps, lots of exotic percussion, a piano and lots
of brass as well as all the usual strings). When playing at their
loudest, the music totally filled the Royal Albert Hall, and I think
I could even feel the floor shake slightly at one point (and we were
in cheap seats, high up and quite a distance from the orchestra
really). In contrast, the ending is a very quiet fade out, and
everyone was very still and quiet for an age until Gergiev relaxed
and let us applaud him and his orchestra (the Kirov).

It's a shame the audience couldn't keep as quiet through the rest of
the performance. There were lots of coughs and
splutters. I don't think I've ever coughed during music at a
concert, so I feel pretty intolerant. They should implement some
sort of “one cough and you're out” policy, because the coughers
are typically repeat offenders. Anyway, here's
a review from the Guardian.

Thursday, 1 August 2002

Jazz, Minority Report and long-term wagers

Listening to:

Ella Fitzgerald singing Just squeeze me, on the
album Ella Fitzgerald day dream: best of the Duke
Ellington songbook. Apparently a recent American TV
series about jazz reckoned that Louis Armstrong was jazz’s
Bach, and Duke Ellington was its Mozart. I can’t remember who
got to be Beethoven. As the account I was reading pointed
out, this is a neat metaphor, but it breaks a little when one
realises that Louis Armstrong was alive for about two thirds
of all of jazz’s history. Bach lived a long time, but he
didn’t manage to do quite that well!

A recent movie:

I saw Minority report last night. I was quite
impressed. The plotting was pretty good, and the
extrapolations built on top of the sci-fi background didn’t
seem too ridiculous. Some of the cinematography was quite
stunning too.
Philip
K. Dick wrote the short story that the film is based on,
and it’s his title. I haven’t read the story, but in the
film, the fact that minority reports are possible isn’t
actually that significant (it doesn’t happen at all that we
see, though the possibility that it might have does
motivate the hero).

I never used to take bets. One particular friend was always keen to
brow-beat by saying things like “Bet you five bucks that
X”. I’d always decline the bet, while still maintaining
that I was right, and that he was wrong of course. More recently,
however, I’ve amused myself by making wagers based on predictions of
how the world will be in some number of years. These haven’t even had
a stake decided, but I'm intrigued by the possibility of being in a
position to write them down, and come back to check on them. Lots of
futurology makes crap predictions that are never checked up on, so I
don’t want to be all mouth and no trousers.

So, here it is, my long-term wager book.
You’ll have to trust that I won’t alter it to make my predictions
come out OK.

Thursday, 20 June 2002

A suitable boy

Listening to:

Eduard Tubin, symphony no. 3 (Heroic). This is part of a CD
from the BBC Music Magazine featuring music by
Estonian composers. I’d never heard of Tubin before, but I
definitely like this symphony of his. There's also a piece by
Arvo Pärt on the CD. He would be the Estonia’s most
famous composer, I’d guess.

I’m listening to this on a new CD player that I bought this
morning at Argos. The computer on my desk here has a CD drive
and a phone-out socket, but it’s become so flakey that it
fails to recognise a high proportion of my discs when I put
them in the drive. So, I’ve given up the ability to control
my music with the mouse, but I can listen to more of it.

Just read:

Vikram Seth, A suitable
boy.

This is the 1400+ page monster that I’ve been
reading since the end of May. And the verdict is: it’s great.
I found it absolutely enthralling. The characters are almost
all sympathetic, and Seth takes the time to paint a
beautifully detailed picture of post-Independence India (1951
and 1952, specifically). The novel’s duration is defined by
the search for a husband for Lata Mehra. It starts with
Lata’s sister’s marriage. With this marriage achieved, the
sisters’ mother makes Lata her next project. The novel ends
when Lata has finally found and chosen her suitable
boy.

But Lata is just one of many characters, and there are many
chapters where she does not feature at all. Instead, we get
many others’ stories as well. These people are connected with
Lata one way or the other, but they all have lives of their
own, and their stories are quite involved. The other
character who gets most attention is probably Maan Kapoor, who
is Lata’s brother-in-law through her sister’s marriage and a
bit of a ‘wild child’.

I could write for ages trying to describe all that the novel
covers, but I don’t think I’d do it justice. Rather, I should
defend it against the possible accusation of being a
family-saga pot-boiler. I think it escapes from this charge
because it’s not simplistic, and it doesn’t seem to trade in
stereotypes. Big sections on the politics of land reform and
religion aren’t just there as window-dressing either. I
suppose it’s possible that someone with more experience of
Indian literature in English would identify much of it as
cliché. My experience is more limited, and it all
comes across as a wonderful window on an exotic world.

To read next:

Friday, 14 June 2002

Bumps, elections and politicians

Listening to:

An extract of Mahler’s symphony no. 6. This is on the tail
end of a BBC Music Magazine CD. The main part of
the CD was a couple of works by Scriabin, but the magazine now
also includes a few extracts from what it thinks are the best
new releases. This is what Gramophone magazine
has always done, but I much prefer having a magazine that
comes with a CD containing complete pieces of music. Extracts
can at best be a minor aid to the text of a review.

And now the news:

The Catz boat bumped yesterday, so I will rejoin them in fine
form I'm sure. Around us, it's curious that (looking at the
chart should make this clear), Jesus VI are now in
position to bump Churchill IV again, after bumping them once
already (on Wednesday).

NZ is going to have an election soon. Helen Clark announced
that it would be two months earlier than expected, on 27
July.

In the UK, the world's concerns seem to be almost taking a
back seat to a ridiculous story about whether or not Tony
Blair tried to lean on the officiating bods at the Queen
Mother's lying-in-state so as to get himself a more prominent
place in the public's eye. The media reported this story, and
the PM's office made a complaint to the Press Complaints
people, claiming it was all a horrible lie. But then, it
seemed that they couldn’t prove it wasn’t, and the Press
Complaints lot dismissed the complaint. For a government
supposedly suffused with spin-doctors, they seem pretty good
at cocking up their press relations on a regular basis.

But then, as a junior minister called Douglas Alexander (and
he sounded Scottish too) sensibly pointed out on the
Today programme, there are rather more important
things going on. The politicians blame the media, and the
media blame the politicians, but I really do think that they,
and the consumers (i.e., the public) too, have to share the
blame for the supposed trivialisation of public discourse.

Monday, 10 June 2002

Excuses and links

Listening to:

Handel, The Alchymist. My CD liner notes (by
Anthony Hicks) say that this was the first orchestral music by
Handel to be heard in England. It was originally an overture
for his opera Rodrigo, but it gets its name
because the suite's various movements

...were used
as ‘act tunes’
(i.e., music played between acts) during a revival of Ben
Jonson's play The Alchymist at the Queen's
Theatre, Haymarket, in January 1710.

Still reading:

Vikram Seth, A suitable boy. I'm up to page 905
of this edition's 1474 pages. It continues to enthrall.

My complete failure to write web-log entries last week stems from
the fact that Monday and Tuesday were public holidays, and while at
work on the remaining three days of the week, I was very busy with
the administrivia required in releasing HOL. Though it has yet to
be announced, you can download exciting theorem-proving files now
from SourceForge.
I offer a similar excuse for my failure to write on the previous
Friday.

But in all this time, I have accumulated a few good links that I
feel compelled to share.

This, for example, is a
pretty cool research project from MIT that aims to find out what's
hot on the web by doing frequent scans of sites that identify
themselves as web-logs, and seeing what they link to. To wax
poetic, it's a window on the communal web-logger's soul. More
usefully, you can see what the web's current best jokes are, and
what its current neuroses are as well. (Good jokes aren't
necessarily guffaw-inducing either. I particularly liked the gentle
humour and style of this
extract from a new book by Paul Robinson.)

There's also this
neat Java demonstration of the scale of the universe through
over 30 orders of magnitude. Of these, I'd estimate that the human
mind can easily cope with about 10 of them.

Of course, the
incomprehensible is easy to find on the Internet itself. In
this case, the more you look at, the wackier it seems.

Monday, 27 May 2002

Girlfriend arguments

Listening to:

Something stupid, sung by Frank and Nancy
Sinatra. I really like this song, but I've never heard of
C. Carson Parks, who wrote it. He’s got a web-page and
I don’t recognise any of his other songs. I wonder how rich
you get on the back of a top of the charts song from 1967.

Now reading:

This web-page
is difficult to judge. It’s a list of things the author and his
girl-friend argue about, and is quite amusing. Nonetheless, it’s
hard to believe anyone would really be so publicly critical about
their other half. She might well have a really thick skin, or find
it all amusing herself. I almost think that the whole character is
a fictional creation. Believing that makes it easier to laugh at
the comedy. The author also makes fun of himself, so it’s not
totally one-sided either.

Tuesday, 26 February 2002

Mapping the world

Listening to:

Beethoven, Grosse Fuge, op. 133 in B flat.
This is easily the most difficult music of Beethoven’s that
I’ve ever heard. It was originally intended to be the final
movement of his string quartet op. 130 in B flat, but when it
was first performed people complained that it was too long in
comparison to the rest of the quartet. In my recording, it’s
almost 19 minutes long, while the first movement is 14
minutes, and all the others are less than 10 minutes long (two
are less than five).

The difficulty probably stems from the
fact that it is a fugue, with multiple lines happening all at
once. I guess I don’t listen to it often enough to have
become entirely familiar with it. It’s pretty fierce stuff,
on the whole.

Just read:

Peter Whitfield,
Mapping the world: a history of exploration.

This is a revised edition of a book written for the British
Library with earlier title New found lands: maps in the
history of exploration. It’s one of the Folio
Society’s special presentation volume freebies, which means
that it’s big (30cm) with lots of nice plates, mainly of maps,
but also of various other prints. These are very nice, but the
text is also very good.

The book summarises the history of European exploration,
starting the main text with the Portugese expansion along the
west coast of Africa, and then getting onto the Americas, the
Pacific, Australia and the polar regions. Before the main
text there is a brief introduction explaining why earlier and
other foreign exploration was qualitatively different from the
sort of thing done by the Europeans. For example, the
Polynesians did a pretty good job of spreading themselves
across the Pacific (an ocean whose vastness Whitfield is
expressive about). Nevertheless, they never maintained any
centralised repository of knowledge about the discoveries that
were being made. (Nor, being pre-literate, would this have
been an easy thing to do.) In contrast, people with the maps
back in Lisbon really did see their net knowledge of the world
increase.

Though the book is not too long, it is pretty comprehensive,
with good discussions of every continent and the explorers who
went there. I enjoyed it. There are a couple of subjects it
doesn’t touch on (though I’d have been interested to read
about them): the mapping of home territories and how this
improved (being a book about exploration, this is a pretty
reasonable omission), and also a little more about
technology. For example, Mercator is mentioned, but his
projection is not.

Now reading:

Thursday, 20 September 2001

Sex, music and politics

Listening to:

Ella Fitzgerald singing Just one of those things,
by Cole Porter. I saw what I assume is a new pop album by Kylie
Minogue being advertised in a record shop’s window on the way
into town this morning. The poster was a side-on view of her
in a skimpy outfit displaying a lot of leg. Well sure, say I,
if you can add a bit of sex to your product, you may make that
little bit more appealing and sell a little more. But really,
what’s on sale here, the body or the music?

I’m sure Kylie Minogue doesn’t feel that she’s being exploited,
and being exploited is really in the eye of exploitee, so all
power to her. However, it is a comment on the
superficiality of the pop world. Just how many unattractive
women pop-singers are there? (In the boy band world, all the
men are smooth-faced and good-looking, but elsewhere there
doesn’t seem to be much restriction.)

At least Ella Fitzgerald established her (well-deserved)
reputation in the era before TV.

A couple of links on last week:

Should the WTC be rebuilt? A negative
view from a couple of architects who are convinced that
skyscrapers are outmoded and generally bad for the world.

A British
perspective on “fighting terror” from Salon.
The author points out that dealing with terrorists is not easy,
and takes a good long time. Finishes with:
Do Richard Perle or Ann Coulter believe that we Brits would have
won our war [in Northern Ireland] if we’d bombed Dublin, Boston
and New York?

By way of context, Ann Coulter famously said We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to
Christianity, but I don’t know what
Richard Perle may or may not have said.

Tuesday, 4 September 2001

Bach and Oscar Wilde

Listening to:

Bach, concerto for
harpsichord and strings in G minor, BWV 1058. The CD on
which this piece appears is part of a five CD set of Bach
concerti. It’s very well documented. In particular, there’s a
nice chart at the back of booklet explaining how Bach reused
music from a variety of sources to write his harpsichord
concerti. It appears that there is no extant harpsichord
concerto of his that didn’t start out as something else. What’s
more, even if the “something else” no longer exists, it’s
apparently possible to figure out what it was. So, while this
concerto (BWV 1058) corresponds to an existing violin concerto
(BWV 1041, in A minor), the concerto in A major, BWV 1055,
is based on a concerto in A major for oboe d'amore that is now
lost.

The musical detective work that goes into this process of
reconstruction and discovery is described a little in the
booklet. There’s enough there to make me think that, one, it
must be pretty neat, and two, it’s yet another of those jobs I
am never going to manage to fit into my life’s schedule. That’s
another to add to the list that already includes astronaut,
conductor, and TV sports director (that last one might require
further explanation later). Incidentally, the code for the CDs
I’m listening to is Archiv 463 725-2, all the recordings feature
The English Concert with Trevor Pinnock and date back to the
early 80s.

Just read:

Oscar Wilde, The picture of
Dorian Gray.

I read this over the weekend, and
rather enjoyed it. It’s written in just the style I expected
from Oscar Wilde, though this is the first thing I’ve ever read
of his, and I’ve never seen any of his plays. (I did see the
film of The perfect husband a while back and quite
enjoyed it.)

The tone is definitely melodramatic, and over-the-top. There’s
lots of description of rich surrounds, flowers, ornaments and
general upper class trappings. There’s also quite a few witty
asides, and epigrams, mainly due to the character Lord Henry.
He is rather enigmatic in a “the devil is a gentleman” kind of
way, and should probably be held responsible for Dorian Gray’s
downfall.

In basic form, this novel is essentially a tragedy: Dorian Gray
is seduced by eternal youth and comes to a sticky end. I don’t
know that Wilde was entirely convinced by the requirements of
the form though; I couldn’t help but feel that he didn’t really
want to have to tell the tale of a downfall. It’s well done,
and apart from a longish section in the middle that details a
variety of pursuits that Gray takes up in order to give himself something
to do with his life, reads very quickly.

I can’t help but wonder what a S/F author might do with the
basic story. Has anyone ever written the story of someone who
is given eternal youth, and then thinks hard about putting this
unique opportunity to work? How would you conceal the fact of
your immortality from the rest of the world? In an age of
increasing centralisation and bureaucratisation, it might be
quite hard to escape the notice of the state. I know I’ve read
stories about people who have somehow managed the trick of
establishing themselves, and who turn up in the 20th century
having been born in the 15th, but this is less interesting.
(From the film Interview with a vampire, I guess
Anne Rice’s books might go on about this, but I don’t think all
that vampire baggage is necessarily very helpful.) Such a story
wouldn’t have the moral and dramatic oomph of Wilde’s novel, but
done well, would surely be mentally stimulating. (For those
that like that sort of thing, of course.)

To read next:

Another book with art in the title, James Joyce’s
Portrait of the artist as a young man.

Monday, 6 August 2001

Nielsen, Conrad and Tornquist

Listening to:

Nielsen, clarinet concerto. This is the most modern work for
clarinet that I have in my collection, yet it was only composed
in 1928. Nielsen wrote it after making the acquaintance of the
Copenhagen Wind Quintet. He wrote a quintet for them in 1922,
and then planned to write each member a concerto.
Unfortunately, he only managed two before died in 1931. The
other concerto was a Flute Concerto in 1926, which I haven’t
heard.

Now reading:

Joseph Conrad, The secret agent. Rather to my
surprise, this novel has turned into rather a detective story at
the moment. All may yet change as I’m only about half-way
through. (I only managed one reading session over the weekend.)

Amusing quotes are us

An amusing
interview with the lead producer of the adventure game
The Longest Journey, featuring this line:

Every Friday night, after the dwarf tossing competition, the
banjo playing championships, and the kilt-knitting class. We do
tend to wear protective codpieces, however, so it’s not
Olympic-class goat hoarding, unfortunately.

Friday, 29 June 2001

Köchel Numbering

Listening to:

Mozart, sonata for violin and piano in A major, K305 (293d). This music classification business is more complicated
than you might think. Why do you suppose there are two
Köchel numbers for this piece? And why does one of them
have a d suffix? I believe the original numbering
scheme was revised as more works were discovered, and also as it
was realised that some works thought to be by Mozart weren’t
actually by him at all. Now this doesn’t in itself require a
renumbering; you could just have a scheme with gaps that
occasionally acquired new, later numbers.

No, the real problem, and the source of the revisions, is that
the numbers are supposed to increase with date of composition, and the relevant scholars have changed their
minds about when some of the works were written.
Further, certain works have such famous numbers by now that
they can’t be shifted around. It’s a problem. The new edition
of the complete Mozart catalogue is discussed here.
There’s also a cute discussion of other “letter” catalogues on
this
page.

Feeble excuses

Monday, 25 June 2001

Music, books and movies

Listening to:

Arthur Sullivan, Macbeth
overture. As well as being the composer partner to Gilbert,
Sullivan wrote music for a variety of other occasions. He
didn’t want to just be a composer of music for musicals. This
overture is the first piece on a CD from the BBC
music magazine . Next up is a reconstructed cello concerto,
and the CD finishes with a Te Deum. It’s very
listenable music, probably perfect for writing web-log entries
to, but perhaps not so memorable.

Now reading:

Joseph Heller, Catch-22. This is another novel
mainly set on a Mediterranean island during World War II. Its
tone is completely different from Captain Corelli’s
mandolin though. More when I’m finished.

A recent movie:

State & Main. This is a very amusing story
about a film production that comes to a small town in New
England. There are all sorts of satiric digs at the nature of
the film business, and a gently done romance. The hero (the
screen-writer) is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also had
a relatively minor part in The talented Mr. Ripley,
playing a completely different sort of role.

Thursday, 21 June 2001

Nielsen, and various links

Listening to:

Carl Nielsen, symphony no. 5, FS97. I’m listening to the first
movement of this piece, which features a rather sinister
side-drum. It’s a use of percussion that reminds me of
Shostakovich. At one point in this movement, the player of the
side-drum is instructed to improvise as if at all costs
to stop the progress of the orchestra.

After talking about expensive air-bag controllers, David Chess is very
interesting here
on libertarianism and whether or not people really should be allowed
to discriminate.

Finally, an
interesting tale (from Salon) of corporate culture,
and how it changes in the face of succees and money. It would be easy
to just say that the arrival of success and money caused an inevitable
decline and deterioration in what had hitherto been an idyllic
paradise. In my reading of the piece though, the situation before was
problematic too. So, I have to be value-neutral, and simply say that
change occurred, and that many people were upset.

Change often upsets people, particularly if they have minimal
influence over the nature of the change. So far, I’m coping fairly
well with the move to our
new building, for example, but who knows what psychosis may yet be
in store?

Friday, 4 May 2001

A problem solved

Listening to:

Schubert, Adagio in E flat, D. 897 «Notturno». I
bought some headphones yesterday, so that I could listen to
music at work and get better sound. Until yesterday, I'd been
using some very cheap in-ear pieces. The difference is
definitely significant.

A proof that there is always a solution to Wednesday's problem:

If trying to find a string of length 2n, for n > 0, draw a graph
with nodes consisting of all the bit strings of length
n-1 (there will be 2n-1 of these). Then draw arcs between these nodes such that there
is an arc between s and t labelled with
s<x> if the last n - 1 bits of
s<x> are equal to t. (<x> is
a single bit, either a one or zero.) There will be 2n
arcs. Each node will have two incoming and two outgoing arcs. By
Euler's theorem, there is a path through the graph that goes over
each arc once. That will easily give the bitstring required.

Thursday, 12 April 2001

Mahler, Mission Impossible and new games

Listening to:

Mahler, symphony no. 9. Mahler was apparently a little affected
by a superstitious worry to the effect that nine symphonies is
as many as a great composer is allowed. Bruckner didn’t even
manage to comlete his ninth, and Beethoven’s ninth was his last.
As it turned out, Mahler’s ninth was indeed his last completed
symphony. (There is a “performing version” of his drafts for a
tenth symphony.)

Thirty-five years later, it seems quite likely that Shostakovich
deliberately thumbed his nose at this tradition of great ninth
symphonies (and thereby thumbed his nose at the Soviet
government, who expected something great of him), by producing a
ninth symphony that was short, not overtly dramatic, and which
seemed very slight.

Anyway, Mahler’s ninth is quite a mysterious work. Its opening
and closing movements are both slow movements (an
Andante and an Adagio), while its two internal
movements are quite raucous and full of strange eruptions of
sound. However, it’s definitely coherent and melodic at the
same time.

A recent movie:

Mission Impossible 2. We got this out on DVD.
It’s slickly done, but it suffers from a number of faults. It
has a serious case of Bond-envy; its plot is ridiculous; Tom
Cruise smirks far too much; the other good guys are far too
marginalised (the best part of the first MI movie was the
initial segment when you saw a team of operatives working
together; Cruise as lone operative dominating the plot destroys
that interesting, and distinctive, flavour), and those bloody
masks are used far too much.

Plot holes range from the typical ridiculous science (why didn’t
the operatives that stole the magic medicine pick up the disease
from the scientist carrying both the medicine and the disease on
the plane?) to the implausible assumptions. Why, for example,
on knowing where the bad guys were (great location, Sydney
Harbour), did the good guys not get in several truck loads of
police to arrest them? The Australian authorities would be more
than willing to arrest people that special US agencies fingered
as terrorists.

Computer game options

I’m thinking of buying a new computer game; maybe Baldur’s Gate II or Age of Empires II. It’s interesting that
they’re both sequels. Both are apparently significant improvements on
their predecessors, which does at least suggest that their developers
have paid attention to what users have said, and thought about how to
improve what they’ve done.

I’ve recently been playing Panzer General II a bit.
(Another sequel! And then there’s Railroad Tycoon II...)
I like PG2 as a relatively mindless, but entertaining way of consuming
30-60 minutes.

Friday, 6 April 2001

HOL training

Listening to:

Mendelssohn, symphony no. 3 in A minor, op. 56 “Scottish”.
Felix did actually go to Scotland at one point, so it seems
reasonable that he should have been inspired by what he found
there. I’m currently up to the sprightly second movement
(Vivace non troppo), which opens with a gorgeous theme
on the woodwind.

Foo and more

A reader suggests this variation on the bee poem:

I'm as busy as a bee with a bum full of honey

but we agreed that mine is better.

Ever wondered about this foo word that computer-geeks
seems so fond of? Now, there’s an RFC explaining all.
It's an April Fools RFC, but this doesn’t make it any less
informative.

The work that has been keeping me so busy recently (running 'round like a blue-arsed fly even) involved the
production of many, many slides to be used as training materials for
the teaching of the HOL system. I’m
just about done now, and happy to say that if you want to see my
handiwork, you can do so here. The
slides were all produced with the Prosper style for LaTeX.

Another part of the project involved the creation of a "case-study"
proving confluence for combinatory logic. Combinatory logic is what
underlies the neat obfuscated programming language Unlambda
(it even has a Comprehensive Archive Network, like TeX, and Perl).

Tuesday, 13 March 2001

Brahms and internet coffee

Listening to:

Brahms, symphony no. 4 in E minor, op. 98. There’s a moving
account in Swafford’s
biography of Brahms of him going to see a performance of
this work just weeks before he died. When the performance
finished, he stood in his box to acknowledge the applause, and
with tears running down his face, shocked all and sundry with
how obviously ill he was. Like his other three symphonies, this
is one of my favourite works; dramatic, full of feeling and
lyrical.

Now reading:

Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit. Staying firmly
in the nineteenth century. In the edition I’m reading, this is
a 700 page epic, and may take me a while to finish.

Coffee cam to go

What I’ve seen described as the world’s first web-cam (I don’t know if
this is accurate or not), is closing soon. Yes, the Cambridge coffee
pot is going out of business because of our imminent shift to new
premises. Our system administrators recently sent round an e-mail to
the effect that this news has caused real problems for our
web-server. Usually it’s new things that cause request spikes.

Thursday, 8 February 2001

Up the duff

Listening to:

Shostakovich, symphony no. 11 in G minor, op. 103 “The year
1905”. A definite programme symphony this, it being a musical
depiction of the events of 1905, when an attempted revolution
in Russia was crushed by the Tsarist government. It’s exciting
stuff, though it can also sound a bit like soundtrack music.

Holiday reading:

Kaz Cooke, Up the duff.

This is an amusing and informative book about pregnancy. The
couple we stayed with in Brisbane "are" pregnant (apparently
this is acceptable usage; you say the couple are pregnant, even
though we all know that it's only the woman who's going to go
through the really painful bits), and this was on their
shelves. Being what you might call a “will read anything once”
reader, I picked this down in a dull moment and really found it
quite engrossing.

I’d never heard of her, but the author is apparently quite a
famous comic writer in Australia (she even has a website). I found Up
the duff a fascinating read. On the other hand, I can
quite imagine women finding it rather off-putting. I don’t
think that I’m particularly squeamish, that I could cope with
all the mess of child-birth itself, but the descriptions of all
the changes that the pregnant woman undergoes while the baby
develops are really quite an eye-opener.

I’m writing a day late today because I spent half of my day yesterday
waiting for the monitor to be delivered. It was, eventually, and so
all is happiness on the home PC front.

Wednesday, 24 January 2001

Music, literature, comics, and hagiography

Listening to:

Beethoven, string quartet in E flat major, op. 127. This is one
of Beethoven’s “late quartets”, and thus tarred with the brush
of perhaps being rather difficult. Really though, it’s not so
bad. The really difficult piece is the Grosse
Fugue, a very long self-contained work that was the
original last movement to one of the other late quartets. I
still haven’t got my head around it.

A lost comic:

Calvin
and Hobbes. The first of the commercial comics I was in the
habit of reading. The author, Bill Watterson, stopped drawing
this comic in 1995, and the United Comics site is gradually
putting all of them online, revealing them one at a time, 11
years after the fact.

C&H is very well drawn, and features some very funny strips. My
only criticism is that it occasionally gets a little preachy,
particularly on environmental themes. It’s also sometimes gives
Calvin a perception of his blissful childhood state that is both
unrealistic (“youth is wasted on the young”) and a little
irritating. All that notwithstanding, still a classic.

Holiday reading:

Patrick O'Brian, The
Mauritius Command.

This is the fourth book in the
Aubrey-Maturin series, and it’s very enjoyable. Instead of the
relatively straightforward solo naval actions of the first three
books, Jack Aubrey is given responsibility (as a commodore) for
a group action in and around Mauritius. To make things even
more interesting, he has to coordinate with the army. All this
brings a new dimension to the storyline, and I really liked it.

Ever heard of Stephen Wolfram? He’s given a
hagiographic write-up in this
piece from Forbes magazine. I read this and got
increasingly annoyed with it. It’s painfully short of detail, so that
you aren’t told just what Rule 30 really is, and there’s no real
attempt to actually discuss the issues. It all boils down to “Geez,
that Wolfram guy is really smart”.

Wednesday, 10 January 2001

Entry #130

Listening to:

Holst, The planets. The
next traversal
CD. This is Holst's most famous piece of work, being a musical
depiction of the seven non-Earth planets known in his day. Of
course, planets don't really have characters, so Holst made them
up, with some reference to Graeco-Roman mythology. For example,
the first planet "described" is Mars, the Bringer of
War. This music is often used as a backdrop to
militaristic scenes in movies and TV programmes. It's a very
successful evocation of menacing military fervour. When I was
younger, I could consistently send shivers down my spine just by
listening to Mars with my full attention, and
imagining some great army marching to death and destruction.
The last planet is Neptune, the Mystic, which
doesn't seem to have anything to do with Neptune/Poseidon, the
god of the sea, but does summon up images of distant quiet and
solitude very well.

Just read:

Well, where do I start? I'm just back from a 6 week holiday
and I read quite a bit while away. I think I'll have to take a
few days to describe the books read. First up then, is the
Aubrey-Maturin series of naval novels by Patrick O'Brian.

Master and
Commander. This introduces the series, and is
quite compelling. I think you'd have to be reasonably
keen on the idea of following the adventures of a naval
captain to stick with it, as this novel is the most
sea-bound of the seven I read. There's lots of naval
terminology to come to either ignore or come to grips
with, and I suspect that having a knowledge of what
tacking and going about is would help. If you read and
enjoyed the Swallows and Amazons books (by
Arthur Ransome) as a kid, there's got to be a reasonable
chance that you will like this.

About my only criticism of this book is the cop-out way in
which the situation with Lieutenant Dillon is resolved.

I have decided that I wasted too much time in the morning reading
online comics in 2000, so I'm giving them up entirely. To mark their
passing, I'll briefly describe (again over a number of entries) what
I'm forgoing.

I've mentioned Sluggy Freelance
before in these pages. In February
last year, I described it as "pretty funny .... [but] a bit juvenile
at times". This would still be my verdict now. I think that its
success is based on the author's willingness to be wacky. Examples of
this include the ongoing feud between the pet rabbit and Santa Claus,
the commando-like secret information organisation built up by
disaffected ex-elves from Santa's factory, and the hapless demons from
the Dimension of Pain who never quite manage to abduct the main
character, Torg.

Monday, 25 September 2000

Pathetic

Listening to:

Beethoven, piano sonata no. 8 in C minor, Op. 13
Pathétique. I wonder when it was that the
word “pathetic” came to have its modern derogatory tone. I’m
pretty confident that its use in 19th century English was
similar to that in French. Beethoven actually gave this sonata
its nickname, something he didn’t often do. (For example, the
“Moonlight” and “Appassionata” sonatas both got their nicknames
from other people.) I’m not sure who gave Tchaikovsky’s 6th
symphony the same nickname, but in any case, the use of the word
is not meant to imply “feeble, helpless and incapable” in the
unsympathetic (ooh, there goes the same word in disguise!)
modern sense.

Maybe the modern world is fundamentally less tolerant of
helplessness than it used to be.

Still reading:

John Byng, Rides round Britain. No progress with
this over the weekend, I’m afraid. I did invade Russia in the
Kishinev scenario of Panzer General
II. I’ll have to write a game review of PG2 at some stage.

Wednesday, 20 September 2000

Mahler, Elgar and Handel

Listening to:

Mahler, symphony no. 10. This symphony is one that Mahler never
finished himself, but which was subsequently published as a
“performing version of Mahler’s draft”. Mahler’s
wife was initially suspicious of the project to do this, but was
apparently brought round to the idea on hearing the initial
performances of this version. It does sound like
Mahler, and there doesn’t seem much argument against letting the
world in on music that would otherwise be accessible only to
musicologists, who would be forced to imagine it as they read
the manuscripts.

Elgar’s third symphony was recently turned into a performable
work in a similar way.

Cute Water Company

I rang the water company this morning to pay our bill. They put me on
hold for a little while and played me some music. It was a familiar baroque
piece (but not Vivaldi’s Four Seasons I hasten to add),
and I thought Good on them for putting something interesting
on. A few seconds later, I realised that the familiar music
was in fact Handel’s Water music. Nice! I felt like
congratulating the operator who eventually answered the phone and
talked to me.

Friday, 8 September 2000

A Proms Concert

Listening to:

Beethoven and Stravinsky at the Proms

I went to another Prom concert on Wednesday night. The programme was
Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms followed by Beethoven’s 9th symphony.
The Stravinsky was only really convincing in the final movement, the
Laudate Dominum. Both the Laudate’s and
the Hallelujah’s were quite spooky and eerie.

The Beethoven took a little while to get going. The woodwind seemed
to have a very harsh tone in the first three movements. The oboe
soloes in the second movement, and the clarinet and horn in the third
movement were all a bit rough I thought. However, the final movement
was amazing. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, some
other phrase or moment caught you unawares, and wow! The choir (the
BBC Symphony Chorus) must have fielded over 100 people, and this made
for some amazingly powerful moments. Bernard Haitink conducted the
BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Monday, 14 August 2000

Entry #86

Listening to:

The best of Thelonius Monk. I'm usually pretty
suspicious of "best of" CDs. However, they do at least serve to
introduce a performer/composer if you have no real knowledge of
what they're like. On the strength of this CD (published by
Capitol Records, using the Blue Note label), I
really should get out there and buy more Monk.

On the strength of just one CD of 16 tracks, all recorded by
1952, I'd characterise his stuff as melodically inventive, with
a crisp, precise feel to it. There aren't extended solos
whereby the original statement of a theme gets distorted and
developed over a long period. (I have a Verve CD of this being
done by Stan Getz and Dizzy Gillespie, and it's wonderful; but
this is not what these Monk pieces do.) Instead, the music
comes to you fully-formed, and quite perfect. These are like
musical short stories.

Still reading:

Mitford, Our village. I'm about 60% of the way
through this, so I'm not going to be able to write my grand
summing up for a while yet. After writing about it last week
(see below), I realised that what was for me the effective evocation of a lost
era might have struck contemporary readers in just the same
way. The early 19th century was a period of quite rapid change
in England, and people then probably felt this change to be
destroying a long lost world. (In fact, this feeling seems to
arise whenever and wherever you look; old fogeys always moan
about the good old days.)

There are a few symptoms of this in Our village.
At one point, the fact that the boundaries of the nearby town of
B--- are steadily approaching those of Mitford's village is
remarked on. Mitford says that she expects her village will one
day be a part of B--- but that she isn't too bothered because it
will surely happen long after her day. She also describes the
Macadamisation of the main road through the village at one
point. Ah, progress!

Monday, 7 August 2000

Cuba and 19th century England

Listening to:

Eliades Ochoa, Sublime illusion. This is the guy
that I liked so much on the Buena
Vista Social Club CD and film. I got this album just
a little while ago, and though it’s instrumentally less varied
than BVSC, it’s very good.

Still reading:

Mitford’s Our village. This one is going to take
ages to finish. This is not because I don’t like it, but
because it’s difficult to read in big chunks. In turn, this is
because there’s no over-arching plot to move you forward. The
various stories/vignettes are pretty much unrelated.

This book has emphasised how ignorant I am of botany. What do
periwinkles look like? What’s woodbine? Am I even sure what
beech trees look like? The book was clearly written in a period
where this stuff was common knowledge. It evokes a lost era
very effectively; making you think that maybe living in a
English village in the early 19th century would be quite nice.

Friday, 4 August 2000

Prom concert review

Listening to:

Schubert, Octet in F, D803.

A promming we will go

I went to my first Prom of the year on Wednesday night. The first
piece was Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C minor, BWV 546.
This was played on the organ. It was a little strange to be listening
to solo music in the Royal Albert Hall. I was in the central arena,
“promming”, and most of the people around me were standing, but I
couldn’t see much point in standing to watch the distant organist's
back. Great music, this. Not necessarily an easy listen; it would be
easy to turn off and just wonder at the noise, but a little bit of
application allows you to hear the different lines and appreciate just
what’s going on.

Next up was Mothers shall not cry by Johnathan Harvey, a
world premiere (and BBC commission) with the composer in attendance.
I didn’t think much of this. It was trying all too hard to be
symbolic, relied on visual cues that were just naff (sword-wielding
warrior with bandages on his eyes blessed by bejewelled princess;
sheesh), and wasn’t musically coherent. There were lots of
interesting musical effects (use of speakers and various electronic
effects around the hall included), but nothing really flowed.

I disliked the programming as well; after this 21st century stuff, we
had to then throw ourselves back in time to the 19th century to hear
Brahms’s double concerto for violin and cello. This was music I knew
quite well. I don’t think it’s Brahms's best ever composition, but
there were moments in the first and third movements of typical and
thrilling Brahmsian intensity; strings rapidly flowing over pulsing
rhythms sustained by deep pedal points. I much prefer this to
Bruckner’s “loud” passages, which seem too dependent on brass
fanfares. I remember one moment of real, rapt beauty from the slow
second movement too.

Finally, the concert finished with another Bach prelude and fugue (in
E flat, “St. Anne”), but orchestrated by Schoenberg. It was strange
hearing familiar music in this unusual setting. Initially, I couldn’t
help but smile as the orchestra was doing such neato things. By the
time it finished, I was less convinced that the orchestral colour was
doing much for the music.

Monday, 31 July 2000

The Ode to Joy and Churchillian wit

Listening to:

Beethoven, symphony #9
“Choral”, in D minor, op. 125. The world’s most
famous symphony? Beethoven’s fifth, with its famous “da-da-da
dah” opening, would probably be the only contender. The last
movement of this symphony earns it the “Choral” nickname. As
far as I’m aware, this was the first time a choir and solo
singers were used in a symphony. Unless the first performance
had the singers file on seconds before their (musical) entrance,
I guess the audience won’t have been too surprised.

In any case, it’s just beautiful music; the Ode to
joy tune is simple enough to whistle yourself, but
Beethoven uses all the tricks (orchestration, digressions,
distortions) to make sure that there’s something to keep the
attention as the piece progresses. Just now, there’s been a big
climax, followed by light, spiky, slightly militaristic flute
and piccolo playing. Then in comes one of the male voices (the
tenor, I think), and suddenly things accelerate. So much so
that now the voices have dropped out and the strings are going
nineteen to the dozen. I can’t do it justice in words, and I’m
not sure anyone can.

Still reading:

Mary Mitford’s Our village. Being a big collection
of bits and pieces originally published for a magazine, it’s a
bit difficult to read this in solid sessions. Yesterday
morning, I alternated with a recent issue of the New York Review of
Books, including this
interesting review of a book about the Langhorne sisters of
Virginia. One of these sisters married Waldorf Astor and became
Nancy Astor, one of Britain’s earlier woman parliamentarians,
and the woman who said to Winston Churchill, “If I was your
wife, I’d put poison in your coffee.” His retort was “And if I
was your husband, I’d drink it.”

Wednesday, 12 July 2000

Classical vs. Romantic

Listening to:

Shostakovich, cello concerto #2, op. 126. Even over the hum of
computer fans, this is relentless stuff. It grabs the
attention, interrupting attempts to write web-logs.

Weather, and a Musical Distinction

It was sunny and nice this morning as we walked into work, and I
thought, “Wow, clearly the way to improve poor weather is to complain
about it publicly on the World Wide Web.” Even thinking that thought
was enough to counteract any magical properties my previous entry had
though, and the sky is grey and cloudy outside my window now, just 80
minutes later.

A bunch of friends and I are trying to decide what Proms
concerts to go and see. Any suggestions?

Talking of music, a reader of my music
pages has asked how to distinguish classical from romantic music.
The easy answer is to say that classical is Mozart, Haydn, J. C. Bach,
and early Beethoven, and that romantic is later Beethoven, Schubert,
Schumann, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms. I think I’ve listened to
enough music to be able to pick an era when I hear something, but I
fear that I don’t know enough to be able to express the difference in
words. I don’t have the musicological vocabulary or training to nail
down what I can hear, though I know there are differences.

Monday, 10 July 2000

Sibelius, and two old Grantas

Listening to:

Sibelius, symphony #2 in D major, op. 43. This is Sibelius’
most famous symphony. It’s dramatic and beautiful without being
overblown. There’s quite a contrast between Sibelius and
Mahler, despite the fact that they were contemporaries. Part of
this may have been geographic: Sibelius was all the way away in
Finland, whereas Mahler was in Vienna, the heart of the
Austro-Germanic tradition. In any case, this symphony of
Sibelius’ is lyrical, and shimmering. Mahler’s second symphony,
the Resurrection, which I also love, is completely
different. It’s strong, forceful and heart-pounding. It has a
message, and it makes very sure that you can’t possibly ignore
it.

Just read:

Granta 10: travel writing.

This was a very good read. There was all sorts in it, and
I enjoyed it all. For example, there was someone
retracing the steps of Robert Louis Stephenson on a trip
in France, visiting a Trappist monastery and getting
footsore on lonely roads. Bruce Chatwin, now dead of
AIDS, wrote of getting caught up in a “coup” in Benin, and
Martha Gellhorn (who I read about in a previous
Granta) wrote about having a miserable time in Haiti.
Richard O’Hanlon provided an excerpt from his (then
forthcoming) book, Into the heart of Borneo.

Granta 16: science.

This was much more disappointing than the travel writing.
Really, it was a good demonstration of C. P. Snow’s two
cultures, because much of the supposed writing about
science was nothing of the sort. It further seemed rather
significant that they couldn’t fill the issue with their
so-called science writing and resorted to other stuff
later on. Further, there were three pieces in a row after
the science section on nuclear war. Perhaps that was all the
editor felt science was good for.

Still, Stephen Jay Gould was good in his piece
Adam's Navel, I liked the two pieces by
Oliver Sachs from his book The man who mistook his
wife for a hat (which I’d already read, but hey),
and Primo Levi’s account of chemical detective work in
Chromium was very good.

To read next:

Wednesday, 28 June 2000

Entry #66

Listening to:

Stravinsky, Symphony of
Psalms. This is a recent recording with Pierre Boulez
conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. It has picked up a not entirely
positive
review at the BBC music magazine. I don't have any
other recording, so I can't tell at this stage.

The third
movement, which I'm listening to now, is quite beautiful and serene,
with hushed voices singing over a gentle tympani pulse.

Of course, we're all big fans of Open Source these
days. Whether you're an old style believer in the way of the FSF and the GNU system, or perhaps a
more liberal, caring, 90s kinda person in the mold of Eric Raymond's famous Cathedral
and Bazaar philosophy, you know that free software is where
it's at.

However, it's also important to realise that it's not a panacaea.
John Viega describes the way in which open-source does not cure
security problems, and can even exacerbate them (because they're more
readily found) in this interesting article
and Eric Raymond (again) describes a similar
issue with respect to the Quake 1 game.

Not that I lap up everything Raymond writes. He has an essay on
the right to bear arms that I find completely astounding.

Tuesday, 13 June 2000

Past England

Listening to:

Elgar, Pomp and Circumstance marches.
These are the quintessential Imperial English tunes. It’s easy
to imagine the feeling of Victorian pride and confidence that
might have attended their first performances. Of course, maybe
I’m imagining a pride too far. Circumstances when they were
written may have been utterly unlike the way we imagine them
now. Nonetheless, this is the aura I think most people attach
to them now. Women in the elaborate dresses; men with monocles
and an Empire on which the Sun never sets.

Still reading:

Maurice by E. M. Forster. This conveys
rather a different picture of a similar era needless to say.
However, I’m afraid to report that I haven’t made any progress
with it at all. This is because I was in London over the
weekend. We went to see the Tower of London on Sunday.
It’s an impressive building, and fascinating for the history
that it “embodies”.

Friday, 2 June 2000

The Green and Slender Willow

Listening to:

Shostakovich, Six Romances on words by Japanese
poets, op. 21 for tenor and orchestra. The
current poem is called An immodest glance and reads (in English):

The green and slender willow
had her swaying trunk laid bare,
when the wind blew, and drew
the branches aside.

And today, my beloved,
I glimpsed your legs,
when the wind blew
and played with your light dress.

Racy stuff, classical music, you know!

The makers of the computer games Thief (and its sequel,
memorably called Thief II) have gone
out of business.

I would have liked to have written yesterday, in order to help clear
the entry deficit but my computer was down and out
all morning and receiving the ministrations of a qualified
professional (i.e., not me!).

Monday, 22 May 2000

Mahler, Forster and Fiji

Listening to:

Mahler Das Lied von der Erde. This
famous piece is not typically counted as one of
Mahler’s nine symphonies, but it is really symphonic
in scale and character. It was written after the
death of Mahler’s four year old daughter, taking as
texts some supposedly Chinese poems in German
translation. The overall theme of the poems is of
the beauties of the earth and its eternal cycle of
death and rebirth. I found that it took me a while
to “get” this music, but I now think it’s one of my
favourite works by Mahler.

Still reading:

Howard’s End by E. M. Forster. The novel
is developing apace. It’s hard to believe that the
impending marriage between Margaret Schlegel and Henry
Wilcox will be a glorious success, but at least
Margaret’s personal emotions and feelings seem to
make a deal of sense. She is much more successfully
drawn than Lucy Honeychurch.

A coup in Fiji

There has been an attempted coup in Fiji. I lived for over two years
in Nadi as a young child, and started school there. I can’t really
remember much from that time, and certainly wasn’t aware of the
tension between the native Fijians and the Fijians of Indian descent.
There has already been one coup in Fiji, led by Sitiveni Rabuka in
1987, and the thought of another one plunging the country into chaos
again is very disheartening.

However, this “coup” doesn’t seem to have the
support of the army, and
the President there seems to be holding firm, despite the fact that
much of the rest of the country’s top politicians are being held
hostage in the Parliament in Suva. For example, there are press
releases from the real government at the official web-site.

Friday, 28 April 2000

Brahms’s Clarinet Music

Listening to:

Brahms, trio in A minor, Op 114 for piano, clarinet
and cello.

I’ve always been very fond of music for the
clarinet. Even as a kid, I thought Mozart's clarinet concerto
was just the greatest. When it was time to “upgrade” from
recorder at the Saturday morning music lessons I went to, it was
very easy to choose to learn to do clarinet myself. I never put
in quite enough time to feel that I was that great, but I did at
least do grade 5 practical affiliated to one or other of the
music schools (Royal College of
Music or Trinity College of
Music).

Brahms’s clarinet music, i.e., this trio, the clarinet quintet,
and the sonatas for clarinet and piano, were all written quite
late in his life. All these pieces are full of beautiful
melancholy. They’re not sobbing melodramas; rather they’re
wistful art, sometimes almost happy as if looking back on the
best bits of life in muted remembrance, and at other times sad,
perhaps rueing lost opportunities.

I liked this rant
on Elian Gonzalez. It’s a “New Zealand” perspective on it all, but I
think that in this case all this means is that you know it’s a
perspective with some distance on the events. Of course, the risk of
distance is that you might be getting the facts wrong.

Friday, 21 April 2000

Entry #37

Listening to:

Bach, Prelude and Fugue in G major from Book I of the
Well-tempered Clavier. This music has a reputation
for being rather intellectual; something that Bach
dashed off as an exercise for aspiring pianists (I'm
actually listening to it played on a harpsichord, but
that is another debate in its own right).
Certainly, I think it would be a mistake to look for
great emotional extremes in it. Nonetheless, it is
not sterile.

I find beauty in it, and it's
not just the sort of celestial beauty of the spheres
that some Bach enthusiasts rabbit on about. Having
moved onto the G minor prelude in the course of
writing this, I can remark on the contrast that this
has with its predecessor in the major. This is
wistful, measured and slightly melancholic.
Now the fugue: this is not wistful. If anything it's
slightly defiant in a deliberate way.

Great listening, but I don't have time to write
a real-time reaction to it; tempting though that is.

Earlier, I cycled to a couple of nearby shops to buy some bits and
pieces for dinner tonight. On the way, I passed a procession walking
down the footpath. I overtook them, and could see before I reached
them that they were a big enough group to qualify for a couple of
police-men as escorts.

Wondering idly if they were off to the Co-op (where I myself was
headed) to protest about something heinous the supermarket had done, I
passed them to find that their placards had "Jesus is King" type
messages on them. Little kids just had little flags with "J"s on
them. Brrr! Organised religion.

The deli had all that I
needed: olives, olive oil, bread and some rich ice-cream. Free
samples as well. It's a great place, and the guy behind the counter
is always very friendly.

Wednesday, 19 April 2000

Music

Listening to:

Heinrich Schütz, Motets for double choir. This
is beautiful choral music with a distinctive
“churchy”, ancient sound.

Once upon a time, someone told me something like the
following story:

Once a upon a time, a child was born to talented musical parents.
They decided that the child should be raised in complete isolation
from the human, musical world, and that its only aural companions
should be the sounds of the birds and animals of the fields and the
forests.

After seven years of this musically isolated upbringing, the parents
finally introduced their child to a piano, and were all aquiver to
see what the young child would do.

After hitting the keys of the piano and beginning to understand
their function, the child, slowly, but with increasing confidence,
picked out the simple beauty of Bach’s C major prelude from Book I
of the Well-tempered Clavier...

Monday, 10 April 2000

A slew of books

Listening to:

Brahms, symphony #3 in F, op 90. My
traversal has passed
through Beethoven and onto Brahms. This CD is the first Brahms
CD I ever owned. I remember buying it and thinking, “I wonder
if I’m going to like this.” Dear reader, I do.

This is the
symphony that features briefly in an episode of Fawlty
Towers. Basil is listening to the opening movement on a
tape recorder, and Sybil, walking past, tells him to turn off
the “racket”. Stridently, Basil replies, “Racket? Racket? This
is Brahms’s third racket!”

Just read:

I read this in bed on Saturday morning. The
previous Sea issue was better, but this was
still pretty good. The title piece was all about
rioting and carnage in Indonesian Borneo. There was an
amusing story in there about a high-heels fetishist, and
also a very interesting extended obituary for Martha
Gellhorn, a respected journalist. (Well, the writer of
the obit. certainly respected her.) She was Ernest
Hemingway's second wife as well, and had interesting,
and fairly derogatory things to say about him.

Where angels fear to tread by
E. M. Forster.

I read this in bed on Sunday morning and thought it very
good. I saw the film
when it came out in NZ. This was one of at least three
Forster adaptations featuring Helena Bonham-Carter that
all seemed to come out at roughly the same time.

The book is really quite amusing for most of its length
with savage, but funny, portraits of repressed Edwardian
sensibilities. Nonetheless, there are dark tones
throughout and the ending is definitely dark, if not
absolutely tragic. I think I slightly missed some of
the impact of the ending because I was reading so
quickly, but that's just some indication of the way in
which it was a compelling read.

To read next:

The longest journey, again by E. M.
Forster. A while back I bought all six Forster novels and now
the day of reckoning is upon me.

Wednesday, 29 March 2000

New buildings

Listening to:

Shostakovich, symphony #4 in C minor, Op. 43. This
symphony was composed in the mid-30s, but not performed until
1960. After being severely criticised by Pravda for his opera
Lady Macbeth, Shostakovich withdrew this symphony
from rehearsals and the next symphony of his to be performed was
the fifth.

The Soviet Union in the 1930s has to have been one of the most
terrifying places to live.

Forgot to put my watch on this morning after my shower. I'm cut off
from the universe!

The supermarket saga continues: it
seems that we may be about to acquire an Asda in place of the
Co-op. We had to walk into town on Saturday morning to do our
shoppping at the central Sainsbury's. Central
Cambridge is carnage on Saturday; I can't recommend it. We did stop
off to do some other window shopping though.

The Computer Lab is moving to a
new building next year. The building site has recently been
officially blessed. The pictures of big-wigs in hard-hats are
ridiculous. It's all so much posturing, a mutant machismo maybe.
Here's an example.

One of my daily visits is to the
Hunger Site. Being able to make a free donation of food for the
benefit of the starving seems a good idea. Or at least, I thought so
until today, when I was suddenly struck by the thought that maybe food
aid isn’t really the best way of helping needy people. I’ve read that
extensive food aid can really mess up local economies, because it can
only serve to discourage local farmers. Equally, not having anyone to
sell food to because they all died of starvation last year is also
likely to be bad for local farmers. I guess I have to hope that the
UN world food program knows what it’s doing.

Today is St. Patrick’s day. President Clinton will apparently be
urging the politicians of Ireland to “give peace a chance” or some
such. Who knows, maybe this will make a difference. Most people I’ve
met from Northern Ireland are pretty cynical about the “peace
process”, but you never know.

Wednesday, 15 March 2000

Beethoven and Barrymore

Listening to:

Beethoven, piano sonata in F minor, op. 57
Appassionata. This recording is on a now defunct
CD label called Lunar. This comes from the DDR
(i.e., East Germany that was). It’s a good recording, and it
was very cheap ($10 in New Zealand). I’m pretty sure that the
Lunar CDs were the first I ever saw that were budget. Since
then, Naxos have
moved into this market in a serious way, and the Berlin Wall has
fallen.

(Incidentally, there’s no sign of any deterioration in the
physical substance of the CD, which is pretty good going for
something that is now over 10 years old.)

Saw Never been kissed (with
Drew Barrymore) on video the other night. Basically, it’s a
pretty dire movie, though I imagine it’s a deal better than the other
films we saw trailed on the video. My standard technique of entering
the URL www.filmname.com gives interesting results this
time. It links to a site providing soft-porn shots of famous
actresses. Clearly the people distributing the film couldn’t be
bothered getting the domain-name for it. A little further research at
the Internet Movie Database site,
reveals the correct site. It
also gives it an average rating of 6.5/10, which is incredibly
generous.

Anyway, the film only served to remind me of the ridiculous obsession
that high school seems to exert over film-makers, and the bizarre way
it is portrayed. Or, and this is a thought to take your breath away,
maybe US high schools are really like that. Tell me it ain’t so.